Team Lead PHP

Talentgrator is a recruitment service that connects IT entertainment and iGaming industry businesses with professionals. We support the growth and development of the iGaming ecosystem through a personalized approach tailored to the unique needs of each business.

Leadership Experience:

• 2+ years of experience as a Team Lead or Tech Lead managing PHP engineering teams.
• Proven experience hiring, mentoring, and leading Senior Engineers.
• Strong people management skills with a coaching and servant leadership mindset.
• Ability to build a peer-to-peer culture without micromanagement.

Technical Background:

• 6+ years of commercial PHP development experience.
• Expert knowledge of PHP 8.x and modern backend development practices.
• Deep understanding of OOP, SOLID principles, design patterns, and software architecture.
• Strong experience with Symfony and/or Laravel.

Databases & Infrastructure:

• Advanced knowledge of MySQL including query optimization, indexing strategies, replication, performance tuning, concurrency, and lock optimization.
• Experience working with Redis.
• Experience with ClickHouse or other analytical databases.

Event-Driven Systems:

• Strong practical experience with Apache Kafka.
• Understanding of event-driven architectures and distributed systems.

Infrastructure Knowledge:

• Good understanding of CI/CD pipelines, Docker, Kubernetes, Linux environments, and networking fundamentals.

Soft Skills:

• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills.
• Strong facilitation and conflict-resolution abilities.
• Experience conducting performance reviews and mentoring engineers.
• Ability to translate business goals into actionable engineering initiatives.

Team Leadership & Development:

• Build, grow, and develop a team of Senior PHP Engineers.
• Participate in hiring and conduct in-depth technical and architectural interviews.
• Design effective onboarding programs for experienced engineers.
• Drive engagement, motivation, and long-term retention of key talent.
• Conduct regular 1-on-1 meetings, performance reviews, and career development discussions.

Technical Leadership:

• Facilitate architectural discussions and guide technical decision-making.
• Help senior engineers reach consensus on complex technical challenges.
• Promote a culture of engineering autonomy, accountability, and continuous improvement.
• Maintain high standards for code quality, software design, and engineering practices.

Delivery & Engineering Processes:

• Establish and optimize development processes using Agile methodologies (Scrum/Kanban).
• Support task decomposition, estimation, planning, and execution.
• Lead code reviews and ensure adherence to architectural and coding standards.

Architecture & System Design:

• Drive the design and evolution of scalable backend architectures built with PHP.
• Evaluate and introduce architectural patterns, frameworks, and integration approaches.
• Ensure long-term maintainability, reliability, and scalability of the platform.

Data & High-Load Systems:

• Oversee database design and optimization for high-throughput environments.
• Improve performance of MySQL-based systems handling thousands of queries per second.
• Design and support analytical integrations using ClickHouse.

Event-Driven Architecture:

• Design reliable asynchronous processing solutions using Apache Kafka.
• Lead the implementation of event-driven communication between services.

Reliability & Incident Management:

• Own service stability and production reliability.
• Drive monitoring and observability initiatives using Prometheus and Grafana.
• Lead incident response activities and coordinate root cause analysis.
• Establish post-mortem practices and continuous improvement processes.

Cross-Functional Collaboration:

• Partner with Product Owners, DevOps Engineers, QA teams, and other Team Leads.
• Align engineering priorities with business objectives and delivery goals.
• Ensure effective communication across technical and non-technical stakeholders.